As we’ve admitted before, if heat waves keep getting worse and worse climate alarmists are going to feel vindicated and the burden of proof will be on those who say they’re not. But Roger Pielke Jr. just started a new series arguing that they’re a long way from being vindicated. Starting with the key point that “‘Climate change’ describes the outcome, not the causes” he then brings up the key point that “heat waves are made by circulation – the movement or stalling of air. Greenhouse gases do not create a heat wave. A weather pattern does.” What’s more, as we also point out in an item below, precisely because Europe is warming faster than the orthodox CO2-driven climate models predict scientists admit the extra warming can’t be due to CO2. A wrong prediction is a wrong prediction whichever way it’s wrong.
It is of course possible that more CO2 in the air makes the planet hotter and a hotter planet experiences more of these particular weather patterns. But it is not an automatic, one-step process. You have to trace out the links and get them right.
Here it is important to realize, if nuanced debate interests you, that Pielke Jr. is far from being a full-fledged “denier” even if every example of idiotic reasoning from the alarmist side pushes him a bit closer. (And beware of idiotic reasoning from the skeptical side because no one has a monopoly on folly.) He believes that more GHGs do trap more heat and:
“That extra energy in the climate system heats the land, the near-surface air, and – critically – the oceans and the source regions upwind of Europe. So when a stalled high-pressure pattern occurs, it does so in a climate system that has more energy than it did decades ago. That means that normal, meteorological extreme heat events will – all else equal – be hotter than they used to be.”
So far so orthodox. But then he gets to the point that:
“In much of western and central Europe, summer temperatures have risen about three times faster than the global average since 1980 – faster than expected from the direct effect of the Earth’s changing energy balance. Western European heat extremes have increased at roughly 3.4°C for every 1°C of global warming, the fastest rate of any comparable region on Earth – outside the poles.”
And unless you are a head-banger, such a thing requires explanation not just yelling “Gotcha! We’re all going to die!”
As he notes, one explanation that has been put forward is that European soil is getting dryer. Which he links to heat. Another, and they are not mutually exclusive, is that reducing air pollution in Europe (which we note has a lot to do with the collapse of the old Soviet bloc and its horribly polluting industry that Western greens never objected to) is letting in more sunlight, and he cites one study whose authors:
“estimate the resulting warming effect at about half a degree Celsius, a meaningful part of the observed warming in Europe.”
What’s more, it seems that the reduction in aerosols may have weakened the summer jet stream. (Climate is complicated, after all.) And if so, because a weaker jet stream is less able to sweep away stuck weather patterns, air with less actual pollution in it is actually increasing the likelihood of heat waves. Bummer, huh?
Again, he’s no denier. He writes “the IPCC AR6 is explicit that the heat wave trend in Europe cannot be explained without human influences” and does not take issue with it. But he also writes:
“Both increasing greenhouse gases and reducted [sic] pollution are human effects on climate, but they operate very differently. Lumping them together as ‘climate change’ subtracts from our understanding.”
He further observes that the Urban Heat Island effect is real and adds dramatically to the death toll from heat waves, and notes another complexity:
“Cities dominate the human toll of European heat waves, because that is where the people are: about three-quarters of Europeans live in urban areas.”
So it’s statistically hard to separate out this cause from other ones although we always wish that with regard to claims of anywhere warming people would cite the data with and without the urban readings. For instance when we read that “Salt Lake City set an all-time record of 109 degrees Fahrenheit as of 4:58 p.m. ET” on July 12, we want to know whether adjacent natural areas did or if it was measured at the airport. Which of course it was. Have they no shame? Or sense?
We also wish that people, and here we include RPJ, would tell us how much of the warming since 1850 they believe is a natural rebound from the Little Ice Age, because all the other things combined can only explain the part that isn’t. And surely nobody with any sense thinks the answer is none at all. But what if it’s half a degree? Or a degree? What’s left? And of course it’s possible that the planet is warming and that it’s bad but we’re not causing it. Nothing in science says if it’s bad it must be man-made, and nothing in environmentalism outside the minds and words of what P.J. O’Rourke memorably called “three bong hit William Blakes”.
In any case, the key point here isn’t whether you’re a “denier” but whether you’re an idiot:
“The politics of the climate issue have favored a simple story that collapses all of the complexity in the figure above into the phrase ‘climate change’ which is typically and incorrectly oversimplified into a synonym for carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Political advocacy runs on simple descriptions of cause and effect. However, effective policy making depends on accurate understanding of causes and effects. Let me be perfectly clear – Nothing in this post is an argument against cutting emissions. In fact, as I’ve often argued, cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a matter of long-run risk reduction, and on that basis alone, makes good sense. Reducing emissions is not about modulating the weather – and certainly is not a thermostat. There are far better justifications for accelerating decarbonization than trying to convince people that climate change causes bad weather.”
We beg to differ on carbon dioxide, siding with Patrick Moore on the alarming carbon famine that has increasingly afflicted the biosphere over tens of millions of years and if not somehow altered will eliminate life on Earth, possibly as early as the next glaciation given how close to the lethal 150 ppm threshold it got in the depths of the last one. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is probably not possible. But it’s certainly not risk reduction given what we know about the flourishing of life at far higher levels and its almost certain demise at slightly lower ones. Risk doesn’t work that way. But we agree on the point that oversimplifying to clobber people politically is not a positive contribution to the mental or physical environment.
P.S. We also ask, if climate change does not cause bad weather, what these justifications are. But one thing at a time.
